"White Shadow"
The fire of your heart. The rhythm of your breath.
She sat in the center of a ring of flames. There was water at her side; the scorching air burned it out of her as quickly as she drank it down. Her body grew hollow and light; the pulse of the drums resonated in her head and down her bones until she was nothing but the flames and the beat.
My first professional sale! "White Shadow" was sold to Julie Czerneda for her YA fantasy anthology Summoned to Destiny.
This story is set in the Kagesedo Isles of the Nine Lands, which aren't on the map I scanned in; they're somewhere off to the northeast of the islands you see, but as the paper ends fairly close to the eastern coastline (or rather, the eastern coastline comes fairly close to the edge of the paper), I've never quite gotten around to pinpointing exactly where they lie . . . which adds a little something to their mystique. The religion of the Kagi makes extensive use of drumming and fire, as the story shows; I listened to a lot of taiko and the "Night Fight" track off of the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon score while writing and revising this story.
The anthology made the "Our Choice" list in the Canadian Children's Book Centre catalogue for 2005, and Pat Forde's review had this to say about my story:
Having just read Brennan's story, I must pause this review for an important aside:
While attending a literary party at the Center for the Study of Science Fiction in Kansas University, I heard a Sturgeon Award-winning writer claim that the most important thing any editor hopes to see in a story is confidence. A confidence communicated by ease, and elegance, and power in the opening lines of prose; a confidence that instantly tells the reader "Relax, you're in good hands, I'm going to deliver just what you're hoping for."
That's the feeling I had reading the opening of "White Shadow".
While Summoned to Destiny's other strong debuts display occasional weaknesses, it's hard to find any fault with this astonishing first sale. I'd never have guessed Brennan was a newcomer. "White Shadow" reads like a gem by a pro in the prime of her talent. (Of course, taking Grand Prize in the Asimov's Undergrad Award is a bit of a give-away that we're dealing with a rising star here.)
Brennan's story achieves the elegance of a Bruce Holland Rogers fable, and is told in a voice as assured as Le Guin in her early Earthsea writings. The same sparse directness of scene; the same simple sentence structure, yielding prose passages of surpassing clarity and power.
Thematically, "White Shadow" is a rumination on power, violence, and self-control -- on the nature of a being's true self, the dark and light together. The fable reflects and refracts issues being debated these days in our own Huntingtonian clash-of-civilizations world ...
I'll say no more about "White Shadow" itself; don't want to spoil your experience of it. Now hurry to the bookstore, buy this anthology just so you can say you have Brennan's first fantasy tale.